Sunday, 10 August 2014

Word War Won?

Fed up with the War To End All Wars yet? Unfortunately, the commemorative frenzy won't be over by Christmas. Four more years! Such a senseless waste of human life, turned into a senseless waste of media air-time... Have we already had Trench-Foot Challenge ("celebrities stand in a water-filled trench all night for a week, and are then forced to run across a booby-trapped ploughed field") or Bully Beef Masterchef? I must have missed those. Radio 4's 1914: Day by Day, presented by historian Margaret MacMillan, has been an honourable exception.

One of the best (as in, most authentically moving) WW1-related things I've seen this year I came across by accident. I heard a short piece of music that I liked one morning on BBC Radio 3, and the presenter attributed it to one F.S. Kelly, who had studied at Balliol College, Oxford, won a gold medal at the 1908 Olympics, and quickly gained recognition as a composer of talent. Tragically, however, Kelly was killed in France, like so many other young men of promise in that generation. Naturally, I followed this up, and in the process discovered that the Balliol College War Memorial Book, published in two volumes in 1924, is available online at, of all places, Flickr.

To browse through these volumes is to get a real glimpse of the bloody swathe that the Great War cut through an entire generation. From just one Oxford college, around 300 men died. Some of them were barely-formed boys, with little more to be said about them than "He was clever; he won a place at Balliol; he joined the army; he died". But some were destined to be the shapers of the future, for example Raymond Asquith. It is particularly moving to read in one place so many contemporary accounts of ordinary and not-so-ordinary untimely deaths in war, using the language and emotional range of the time, and written while the grief was still raw.

Kelly's page is here. Remarkably, he was present at the death of Rupert Brooke at Skyros en route to Gallipoli (not from wounds, but from an infected mosquito bite). In that last heyday of the old, rigidly class-bound Britain, it seems such young men of talent and similar background found themselves thrown together wherever they went. As someone once said, "life is just one damn Balliol man after another".

19,000 British troops were killed on the first day of the Somme. If we assume an average time of say, 2 seconds to read out a name (ranging from "Tom Smith" to "Algernon Twisleton Wickhamton-Fiennes"), then that's about 10 hours of broadcasting on 1/7/2016...

Can you imagine? It would be worse than the Archers Omnibus on Sunday mornings...

Mike, this is a great blog! (I stumbled here looking for something on JO Morgan).

Simon Jenkins had an interesting article echoing some of your thoughts:

'Britain’s commemoration of the Great War has lost all sense of proportion. It has become a media theme park, an indigestible cross between Downton Abbey and a horror movie. I cannot walk down the street or turn on the television without being bombarded by Great War diaries, poems, scrapbooks and songs.'